Chinese authorities are cracking down on academicfraud after an international medical journal retracted107 Chinese-authored papers from the past fiveyears, in the biggest case to date of fake peerreviews to endorse research.
Springer, publisher of the journal Tumor Biology,said the retractions were made because the peerreview process - in which an independentacademic recommends a paper for publication -had been [deliberately compromised by fabricatedpeer reviewer reports".
China`s ministry of science and technology said this week that the incident had [seriouslyharmed the international reputation of our country's scientific research and the dignity ofChinese scientists at large". It vowed a [no tolerance" approach to academic fraud.
The government pledged to investigate the papers` authors and may strip them of theiracademic roles. All grant funding to the academics involved has been halted.
Academic publishing is the latest sector of the Chinese economy to encounter fake products,sales figures or reviews. Ecommerce has been plagued by waves of fake orders designed toimprove the rankings of online sellers, while the cinema industry has been embroiled in acontroversy over government attempts to censor unfavourable reviews of Chinese-madefilms.
China`s race to become a world leader in science and technology has led it to become thesecond-biggest source of academic publications globally.
However, the pressure applied to academics to publish or perish has had adverse effects, saidZhang Yuehong, an editor of the Journal of Zhejiang University.
In recent years, China has seen a surge in academic scandals in medicine and biology. MsZhang, who pioneered anti-plagiarism software in scientific publishing, called biotechnology a[disaster area".
Last year, the food and drug regulator found that 81 per cent of applications for drug approvalswere withdrawn after the pharmaceutical companies were asked to check their clinical data.
The US, which had led the world in academic retractions over the past three decades, wasovertaken by China in 2009, according to a paper by Michael Grieneisen and Minghua Zhang atthe University of California, Davis.
China and the US continued to have high numbers of retractions since 2010, but China`s ratewas roughly the global average when taking into consideration the volume of papersproduced, said Harry Xia, president of the Alliance for Scientific Editing in China.
The difference was that Chinese retractions were more likely to be associatedwith academicmisconduct, Mr Xia added. China leads the world for articles retracted due to fake peerreview, according to data from Retraction Watch, an NGO that tracks academic retractions.
In 2015, the British Medical Journal`s BioMed Central retracted 43 papers on suspicion of fakepeer reviews, of which 41 were by Chinese authors
In addition, the rise of scientific editing companies has led to researchers paying not only forproofreading or checking English translations, but for scientific scrutiny and even additionaldata, according to a paper by Karen Kaplan, an editor at the journal Nature.
The government-backed National Natural Science Foundation of China said that 28 of 117Chinese papers retracted by major international publishers from 2015-16 had been [touchedup" by companies, with some being [bought from and written by others".
[One possible reason for the higher rate [in China] is the large bonuses paid to researchers whopublish in prestigious journals," said Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch.
Not only university researchers but also practising doctors in China are required to publish ininternational journals to get promoted.
[China needs to let scientific research calm down. The research world here is too fickle andimpatient," said Ms Zhang.
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